How does free enterprise fit into President Obama’s vision for America?

Daniel Rothschild

Daniel Rothschild is director of state projects and a senior fellow with the R Street Institute. He joined R Street in October 2013 after two years as the first-ever director of external affairs and coalitions at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he spent six years in a variety of policy, communications and project management positions at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

His popular writing and articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reason, theChicago Policy Review, Economic Affairs and many other popular and policy publications. He was a 2012-13 National Review Institute fellow. Dan has testified before the U.S. Congress and several state legislatures on tax and fiscal policy, government reform and disaster recovery policy.

He has a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College, a master’s degree from the University of Manchester, and a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Michigan.

Picking Osawatomie, Kansas as the site for an address is the kind of over-the-top symbolism that would make even Aaron Sorkin blush.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, then a year and a half out of the White House, used the small town as the location to announce a detailed plan for the philosophy he called “New Nationalism,” an expansive progressive agenda, one he hoped would form the basis of the platform of his own Republican Party.

By contrast, President Obama’s speech this afternoon in Osawatomie was glaringly lacking in specifics. Instead, it was a motley assortment of bumper sticker meditations on the importance of education and the scourge of income inequality, and appeals to increase “fairness” in the tax system (as if anyone claims to want an “unfair” tax system).

In short, it was a typical political stump speech favored by politicians of both parties: long on rhetoric and short on policy, based around a potted Whiggish version of American history.

This is no surprise — the president is, after all, a politician, and he’s asking the American people for a second term as president. But it does represent a missed opportunity for him to articulate a clear vision for his beliefs about free enterprise, markets, and competition.

Obama gave the requisite nod to free markets, calling them “the greatest force of economic progress in human history.” But he gives no sense of how he sees free markets and free enterprise — as they actually exist, not in dystopian fiction or Michael Moore movies — as interacting with any other part of his vision for the United States.

The role of free enterprise in American culture is a defining issue of the day. None of the major policy questions that dominate the public discussion — tax rates, the deficit, broadband, roads — can be understood without a clear vision of the proper relationship between the government and the private sector. And this requires a theory of free enterprise. If the president is going to campaign on a sharply populist platform, he needs to articulate how free enterprise and free markets fit in with his vision of America and economic growth and prosperity.

We get some sense of this from the occupations and businesses he mentions in his speech. The picture he paints is largely one of an America long gone by. He acknowledges the “painful disruptions” of globalization and the information revolution, discussing the factory workers, bank tellers, phone operators, and travel agents whose jobs have been replaced. These are changes to be grieved, not part of a larger trend of growth leading to increased prosperity and opportunity.

Fortunately, the president’s rhetoric doesn’t rise to the level of John Kerry’s faux-populist attacks on “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” But it is based on an us-versus-them outlook in which there’s basically a limited amount of wealth, in which the “big banks” and “one percent” conspire against voters. “Inequality” gets twice as many mentions in the speech as “growth.”